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Artificial Sweeteners: Not So Innocent After All

Jun. 25, 2013|250 views

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Artificial
sweeteners have a checkered past. Once hailed as the answer to too many sugar
calories in the diet, they were marketed as “zero-calorie” substitutes. You
need only glance at the soda aisle in your supermarket to witness the
popularity of “diet” soft drinks featuring “zero calorie” artificial
sweeteners.

First
came cyclamate and saccharine. Discovered in the 1930s, cyclamate was banned by
the FDA in 1969 after data emerged indicating that this synthetic chemical
might increase the risk of certain cancers (not to mention causing shriveled
testicles in males). Saccharin is a coal tar derivative. If that doesn’t tell
you all you need to know about the healthfulness of this artificial product,
keep in mind that the FDA attempted, unsuccessfully, to ban it in 1969. It
remains on the market, to which I say: Buyer beware.

Concerns
have also been raised about more recent additions to the artificial sweetener
arsenal, such as aspartame (e.g. Nutrasweet®) and sucralose (e.g. Splenda®).
Now scientists at Washington University School of Medicine have shown that
sucralose affects the way obese test subjects react to subsequent glucose.
Glucose is a simple sugar that circulates throughout the bloodstream after food
is digested. It’s a basic source of energy, but too much is harmful. Secreted
in response to glucose, insulin is a hormone that helps cells take up glucose
so it can be burned for energy.

In the
experiment, obese subjects consumed sucralose before drinking a test glucose
solution. Their bodies responded to the
glucose with higher levels of insulin, and higher levels of blood glucose than
subjects who did not get sucralose first. Although it was assumed that a
zero-calorie sweetener would not affect glucose handling, this experiment
showed that such is not the case. The implication is that artificial sweeteners
may affect diabetes risk in ways we don’t fully understand.